Recently I got a very confusing error when setting up a PubSub subscription to write to a Big Query table via terraform. Here’s the partial terraform code snippet:

resource "google_pubsub_subscription" "subscriptions" {
  for_each = var.subscriptions
...
  dynamic "bigquery_config" {
    for_each = can(each.value.bigquery_config) ? [each.value.bigquery_config] : []

    content {
      table          = bigquery_config.value.table
      write_metadata = true
    }
  }
}

And the input variable subscriptions looks like:

subscriptions = {
  "my-test-sub" = {
    topic                      = "my-test-topic"
	...
    bigquery_config = {
      table = "my-gcp-project.my-dataset-id.my-table-id"
    }
  }

It doesn’t show any error when doing terraform plan however it gives 403 error when applying.

googleapi: Error 403: The caller does not have permission

After some googling I found this issue very relevant, because in Google’s doc(Example Usage – Pubsub Subscription Push Bq as of 6th Sept 2023) project.dataset.table is the format of the table name however the format that actually works is project:dataset.table . So the variable looks like this now:

subscriptions = {
  "my-test-sub" = {
    topic                      = "my-test-topic"
	...
    bigquery_config = {
      table = "my-gcp-project:my-dataset-id.my-table-id"
    }
  }

But I still got that 403 when applying, which makes 0 sense to me because I’m the owner of my GCP project obviously. Retrying a few more times with terraform apply won’t change anything, I decided to try the same thing via the Cloud Console – maybe it works there then I can see what should be changed in my code.

In the Cloud Console GUI, I tried to create the subscription the click-ops way, and voila! Here’s the real reason of the 403s:

Service account [email protected] is missing permissions required to write to the BigQuery table: bigquery.tables.get, bigquery.tables.updateData.

So in a nutshell the 403 wasn’t for me but for this built-in service account of PubSub. And the best role supplying bigquery.tables.get and bigquery.tables.updateData permissions is roles/bigquery.dataEditor. After this role binding was added, terraform apply finally succeeded 🙂